Yottabytes, Zillioinics, and More at Defrag 2012

HP Vertica sponsored this year’s Defrag Conference, so I had the opportunity to attend the event in Broomfield, CO. It’s close to the startup community in Boulder and right in my backyard. It was a great conference with an intimate setting. Defrag started in 2007 as a forum for exploring information overload and building implicit tools for the web. In years 2-4, Defrag’s focus shifted to things like enterprise collaboration, social media, and Big Data.

A Future of Yottabytes?

There were a lot of good takeaways and the theme that continues to permeate everything these days is data. The keynotes were great, led by Kevin Kelly, Founding Executive Editor, Wired Magazine. Kelly noted: “Technology and human activity are so global that they operate together as if they were a geological force.” He described this global system of technology deployed around the planet as an “emerging superorganism.” In an industry where I’m focused on how I solve problems today, it was interesting to take a step back and think where technology and data will be 20, 30, and 50 years from now.

When the topic of data came up and the future of data, Kelly talked about the Yottabyte, which is one septillion bytes or 1024. We are truly experiencing an explosion of data (he even included explosion math) to illustrate the amount of data being generated. We will eventually be in the yottabytes. The problem is there is no metric prefix after yotta. He gave some humorous suggestions, such as Lotta or Hella, but it’s a largely unknown area. He followed up with a more realistic approach to naming after yotta and talked about Zillionics. You can read more about Kelly and his thoughts at http://kk.org/

Solving Big Data Problems Today

Back to the problems of today, we are helping many of our clients solve this explosion of data problem. Similar to how Kelly draws analogies that technology is now part of our ecosystem, data permeates organizations both internally and externally. It has also become a part of us. Companies that will be around the next 50 years are the ones that will adapt and drive decisions based on information.

This goes for HP Vertica, too. We are constantly adapting and changing to the information that we receive from our clients and the marketplace. HP Vertica allows you to adapt quickly to the continuously evolving, next generations of hardware, software, and data.

Over this Thanksgiving, give thanks and take some time to think about the future of technology, how you will better deal with the explosion of data, and a good name for something after yotta. Maybe in the spirit of technology, we can put it on the web for a vote.